Hitherto, this kind of wireless input device was composed as shown in FIG. 1. Concerning this constitution, an example of household game machine is described below.
As shown in FIG. 1 (A), a wireless input transmission device 11 comprises input means not shown, such as keyboard switches and pointing device, and is designed to communicate with a wireless receiver 12 one way or two ways. The wireless receiver 12 is connected to a main body 13 such as information processing apparatus or game machine through a cable 14.
Data generated by input means of the wireless input transmission device 11, that is, one-input information to be communicated between the wireless receiver 12 and the main body 13 through cable is supposed to be composed of three bytes as shown in FIG. 1 (B). That is, in first byte, bit 0 indicates left switch on/off, bit 1 right switch on/off, bit 4 and bit 5 respectively positive direction or negative direction of X- and Y-axis, and other bit 2, bit 3, bit 6, and bit 7 are not used. In second byte and third byte, data in X- and Y-direction (0 to 255) are indicated by eight bits each of bit 0 to bit 7.
In this one-input information, for wireless communication between the wireless input transmission device 11 and wireless receiver 12, by adding a new byte or the like for guaranteeing data aside from the data in FIG. 1 (B), wireless communication is effected by using a same number or equivalent or greater number of bytes (in this example, N bytes) as compared with the case of wired communication.
In such conventional constitution, however, in the case of wireless communication with the main body 13 which is, for example, a personal computer, as the quantity of input information increases, the current consumption spent in communication increases, and the battery life of the wireless input transmission device 11 is extremely shortened, which gives rise to a problem of frequent exchange of batteries.